In a webcast for financial analysts yesterday, EMC admitted it was racing to catch up with NetApp in storage for virtualised servers by adding primary block-level deduplication.
The good news came from Pat Gelsinger, an EMC president and its chief operating officer via Stifel Nicolaus analyst Aaron Rakers. Apparently Gelsinger …

Unified

EMC also does block emulation

In EMC documentation it is CLEARLY STATED that the new pools (mandatory to use the new features) rely on a filesystem on top of RAID groups.

Which is exactly how NetApp also works.

There's no "native block" - all modern arrays virtualize most things to the extent that the statement makes zero sense. See here: http://blogs.netapp.com/efficiency/2010/10/more-questions-than-answers-emulated-luns.html

ZFS prescribed

Sent to me :-

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Hi Chris: In reference to this article. "EMC races to catch up with NetApp"

All EMC has to do is integrate ZFS into its kernal to make a run at NetApp's customers. BSD has ZFS integrated now and if a company like EMC put its boffins to work an creating a system based on COTS equipment with integrated CIFS and NFS they would have a winner.

ZFS, seriously?

Sorry I have to go AC on this one.

Clariion has a Windows kernel, not posix. It cannot run ZFS without a total re-write.

As it is, new features that EMC has been releasing in NaviSphere are not working out too well. Virtual pools? Excessive SP utilization. Thin provisioning? Fragmentation leading to horrible performance, we better turn that off.

Random storage processor reboots? Yes, please! Far more drive 'failures' than any other vendor? Yep. And I haven't even started talking about trying use Celerra.

It is the polar opposite of NetApp's "it just works".

VNX looks like more of the same with faster storage processors and a new name. Bravo! This will sound like opinion but it's real life results from a big EMC shop using CX/NS-4. If this isn't happening to you, then you either:

- Use 1999-era EMC functionality with mundane raid groups , FC and no new features